Tuesday, 26 April 2011

Darwin, I suggest may re-write his theory of evolution given the right circumstancial evidence and the Pryce family is just about as circumstancial as one can get this side of a dodo.

I am keen to communicate, I welcome conversation. I am one to enjoy the rise and fall of an accent. Today I am abandoned to more monosyllables than one man should get after saying "I do. My teenagers speak in words unfortunately one at a time. Minutes may pass before another is cursed into the air.

By darn, my inner calm is being tested, because my outer calm has gome walkabout big time.... its doin' a bloody marathon. This is dumb, because it can't be dumber, its got two syllables.

A battle wits of my sardonic eloquence against the one word resistance of the verbally challenged teen.

I know I am losing as the Teenagers smile. Monosyllabic to non syllabic. Darn them.

Lessons in staying cool are brewed from years of deep freezing. I am reaching boiling point.

Time for the big guns. Its time to refer to the zits, there may be tears. Tears have no syllables.

I feel I may be losing the Dad of the Year Award, that I used to win annually without trying. I have the cups to prove it, washed to ceramic in the dish washer, over the years the words have been erased. Perhaps more than the words have been erased. The meaning of the words once perceived for the gullible toddler buying public, now an empty sign of the effort poured in to earn the right to be put on this pedastal . A pedastal not sought but welcome.

We used to walk in the park, I used to carry her on the shoulders of the Giant growing smaller with the years. We used to ....

Its time to roll back the years to come back to a balance,........sorry.

Friday, 22 April 2011

In my day and age of teenage kicks, we knew how to rock'n'roll without a digital tampering sample dub or words to that effect.

The weather is hot and the Teenager is un-nerved in a cold digital world. There is something wrong, my spidey sense is in the redddening zone. I may need some subterfuge; I may need persuasion, this is a tough call, but I'm doing it for the kids. Breaking the silence may need more than wind.

Today I have to decode the teenage dna, we walk together in the park. This may be groundbreaking in more senses than earthquake. I am about to enter the teenage zone of reasons why it is hard to be a teenager in a modern cruel world. I am about to receive the key to understanding teenage kicks throughout the night in a New Millenium.I understand the modern cruel world is roughly translated as me, as in Dad, as in embarassing Dad syndrome. Apparently I can be embarrassing, ....Moi.......me......as a parent, I am apparently not a teenage asset. I am am being asked to parent in the shadows.

In my age, you could get to cool via nerd by excelling as a super nerd. Super nerds were cool because they made left-of-centre positively so off centre that falling over was a necessity with or without alocohol.

However this middle-aged super nerd apparently has returned to nerd with or without alocohol. Apparently, if this boy-father-son-hobbit thing is only going to work, if I give up the skull and cross bones t-shirt. Or as his teenage compromise, and he believes it is a major concession, at least not wearing the "garment" outside the house.

Thursday, 21 April 2011

I have more bags under my arms than under my eyes. This is a long way of saying that I have a lot of bags. Bags in all shapes and sizes, I am a connoisseur, a suitacse buff of necessity........Hardcase - soft case, 24 hours case, the lightweight emergency one, the mega expandable multi-zip, the "two dayer" (business) as opposed to the "weekender" (pleasure), the "week", the "overnighter", the laptop carrier in versions small, medium, large and large with wheels and to wrap it up the British Expeditionay Force Trunk.

It is all a symptom, a sign like a burning bush without the smoke, it all means I am away a lot.

I am remote parenting and feeling guilty.

I am single parenting the kids as a byproduct of earning the family crust. Life was not meant to be this way when I was a teeanger. I was going to be...... a proper Dad.

I appear to be a "the Visiting rights" bloke who looks a bit like the foto on the walland without the court papers. I may be the man putting Diss in Dysfunctional.

School interviews missed, the footie game foregone, the serious talk over ciggy mis-used unsaid, the laughter over the family legends not re-told and the years are gone.

Saturday, 9 April 2011

Thank God for mirrors. This adult-in-waiting can see the visible signs, we can see the visible signs, boys can see visible signs, the world will have to wait before this girl goes prematurely to the Prom. She has to wait a tad longer before thinking she is a grown-up.

There is a zit, a zit that says hormones are a-charging and you are younger than you may like to think. And thankfully a zit makes you look as young as you are with all the best makeover creams in the world cannot quite make that zitless look.

One or two zits just enough to slow the race to illicit things that I leave it to my wife to navigate.

A hole in a T-shirt can give street cred where all that was before was a geek seeking non-nerd statehood, but with a do-not-pass-go card that makes three brass monkeys dumber than one primate on the path to evolution.

Am I rambling so to cut a long story short, we all evolve and he ~ the teenager ~ needs my t-shirt to accelerate his adulthood because my t-shirt is cool and is an instant pass to the cool kids. Or so he says in an ineloquent mix of ums, dohs, wannas, heys, as he makes a short story long, as he exercises my rapidly ageing brain cells, the teen translator is near bust.

My T-shirt is faded by time and a star moodily stares out, a star that has survived to be iconic to a new generation. The iconic look has not dated, unlike the cotton it sits on. So to exaggerate for poetic effect I am asked like Pharoah letting my people go, I let my T-shirt go. I make the sacrifice of an inheritance worth more than the cotton picking moment it was bought.

But and double but a holed t-shirt is cool. A holed sock is cotton picking not. My sock of which I have unnecessarily close relationship based on it fits quite nicely thank you very much. My sock is holed like a torpedo called a big toe ~the teenager big toe. My sock is so uncool it traverses the metaphor, it breaks the metaphor, I could get a bloody cold big toe.

So today like many other days, I am facing the executive grilling looking superficially office smart cool, as smart as pink tie on pink shirt can look cool without blushing to give the full pink on pink on pink full effect. Today not like other days, I know I am one shoe removal away from being an embarassment to the VIP Business lounge at an airport. I have a teenager not only stealing my socks, but damaging them. Ho hum. Hobbit boy needs to learn to darn. Darn it.

This is sock abuse. Sock abuse is what this parent needs like a hole in the head, with the notable exceptions of mouth, nostrils and a couple of ear drums. The latter holes being fairly valuable holes in the head, methinks. I have a university education and all that.

This is not on.

And to double whammy my "not on"- us. A T-shirt is returned. I say T-shirt. A T-shirt carefully loved over a decade, gently nursed through fading years, here now it is somewhat ripped, a little cigarette burned perhaps. An icon has a hole in the head that is not where a nostril should be.

It now in fact not a t-shirt, but a oil cloth for the car, today I feel a full body adult tantrum coming on and by damn I deserve it. I may take Mr Scissors to more than a toenail.

Friday, 8 April 2011

Sleeping with the toddler was an overnight experience of duvet empire-building that Victoria would have been proud of. It was won by a cart wheeling toddler marking out a perimeter that left parents in danger of getting out on the wrong side of the bed too early and indeed by the previously un-used technique of falling.

Actually I lie, we never fell, we tottered and under a REM induced feats of balance survived on the mattress rim like a circus artist without a clown to laugh at us. Thank God that the sleeping brain has power to awake the dozing mind that the ribbon of the mattress was what was left of my bed-time empire by early morning. Toddlers should not sleep with parents.

The Teenager should not sleep with Pa either. But in a time warp chasm in the facric of the Pryce universe, time has reverted. Due to painting bedroom, partners have changed. By some luck of being too old to argue anymore, the boy and me share a bed.

Ok it sounded sensible at supper-time. It was a logical conclusion, it was fair play, it was family, it was a mistake that the diamonds of time will convert into sand.

Ok he did not like it. I did not like it but it was the sensible option at suppertime. An hour is a long time in parenting and eight hours is a lifetime.

Minutes to midnight the cartwheeler has returned but he is bionic now, he is elongated, he has muscles that have been trained on a school football field. The sleeping brain may be marvelous but a cantilvered kick by giraffe boy is catapulting me to another space-time-continuum. This is not empire building by nudges but a fully trumped up charge at the paternal defences. Hobbit foot is leaving more than a duvet trapped gaseous carbon footprint, he is leaving a bruising footprint on the Pa Pryce butt.